Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Friday, October 14, 2005

What Passes for Knowledge

Found in a local Catholic parish bulletin:

"This weekend, we are blessing the pipe organ...As we bless this organ, let it stand as symbol of all of our musical instruments"This rhetoric is deficient, to say the least.

The pipe organ is not a 'symbol' of 'all musical instruments,'--it is, rather, a representation of the voices of all creatures. That is the reason why the Roman Catholic Church specifically recommends the pipe organ for worship--not the piano, not the banjo, not finger cymbals. That's why it's called "organ," from the Greek, organon...And--since readers of this blog are pretty bright--you've likely concluded that the pipe organ's use of wind, or 'breath,' (pneumos) is also an interesting little side-symbol.